


Time's Kind Mistake

by Polska_1999



Series: Sprint Towards Blackout (Happy Steve Bingo 2018) [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Happy Ending, M/M, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-16
Updated: 2018-09-16
Packaged: 2019-07-13 06:30:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,322
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16012214
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Polska_1999/pseuds/Polska_1999
Summary: Some time after the Battle of New York, Steve is asked to investigate a magical disturbance in Europe. His mission is to observe and report, but upon reaching the site, he finds something surprising.





	Time's Kind Mistake

**Author's Note:**

> For the _Time Travel_ square on my **Happy Steve Bingo** card.

_ “Captain Rogers, we have a mission for you. Our devices indicate an unnatural occurrence of magical nature in Europe, and we believe it to have ties to the Tesseract.” _

Such had been the beginning of the deceptively simple mission, one meant to ease Steve back into the field as everyone recovered from the Chituari attack and the Battle of New York. All he was meant to do was check out the disturbance and report back to headquarters about what it was and if it was dangerous. He was not meant to approach it or interact with it in any way. 

Problem was, he couldn’t just do that. 

From the moment he saw someone lying unconscious on the ground at the exact location he was told to investigate, his instincts had taken over, and he rushed to the person’s side. (Of course, he wasn’t completely stupid, and thus approached with his shield raised, just in case.) When the person didn’t twitch at all as he approached, worry began to creep in — what if this was someone who had been at the wrong place at the wrong time and simply got injured by whatever occurred as a direct result of the magical disturbance? Maybe the magical disturbance was malevolent in nature… Right now, he could only hope that the body on the ground was simply unconscious and not dead, and if they were unconscious, then they likely needed medical attention in order to stay alive. 

He crouched down, attaching the shield to his back, and carefully moved the body, turning it over so the person was laying on their back. Most of their face was covered in mud, hiding any distinguishing features. Their skin was tinged with an ashen grey hue wherever it was visible, and the short brunette hair atop the person’s head was wet and caked with mud. It was probably a guy, based on the looks, but something about them looked… odd. (Beyond the obvious, of course.)

Steve fumbled slightly as he reached out to check the person’s pulse, his hands trembling slightly on their own accord for reasons he neither understood nor knew. He breathed a sigh of relief when he felt the strong and steady pulse beneath his fingers as he looked over the rest of the person. Overall, they seemed to be breathing fine and didn’t appear injured… which begged the question as to why they were face-down in the mud and unconscious in the first place. Steve looked around at his surroundings, but he saw nothing out of place. 

He couldn’t leave the person here. Not only were they apparently part of whatever disturbance occurred here, but they were also potentially injured, and Steve was not willing to allow someone to die needlessly. Steve did one last check just to make sure that there were no spinal injuries or anything that posed a risk if Steve were to lift the man… and then he saw it. A tiny metal chain around the man’s neck, connected to something hidden beneath a mud-covered jacket. 

Steve frowned and examined it. Didn’t look like a bomb or weapon, but it could be cursed or whatever was currently cliche in novels nowadays. (He used to have a very strict sense of what was and wasn't possible. Then he woke up in the wrong century and aliens invaded New York.) Thus, he avoided touching the chain itself and instead pulled at the jacket, a few pieces of mud flinging off of the cloth as it shifted in his grasp. The chain went down a bit farther, until it stopped with two little flat pieces of metal attached to it — dog tags, the type soldiers wore, the type he himself had once worn. 

Now that in itself wasn’t odd; after all, there were a lot of people in the world who were soldiers. It would not be too unlikely for the person Steve found to be just another soldier. There was one gaping fatal flaw with that theory, though. One of the dog tags had a very familiar name.

Steve’s own name, in fact. 

And the other? Well, that dog tag carried the name of ones James Buchanan Barnes. 

For a moment, Steve forgot to breathe. This… this wasn’t possible, was it? It had to be some sort of cruel, cruel joke. Maybe the universe was out to get him, or maybe SHIELD decided to test his mental stability in an incredibly cruel manner… but that didn’t make sense, because no one except the other members of the Howling Commandos and Peggy knew that Bucky wore both sets of tags, and as far as Steve knew, the Howlies took that secret to the grave and Peggy never mentioned it. The likelihood of SHIELD knowing about that was impossibly low. 

Once Steve’s muscles remembered how to move (breathing was still a work in progress, though), he reached over to try and remove some of the mud that masked the person’s identity. With every bit wiped away, the truth became more and more difficult to ignore, and other factors came into play, too. The jacket, the odd style of clothing that Steve knew seemed off but he didn’t know why (probably because it wasn’t quite too odd for him)... 

Whatever magical disturbance SHIELD’s equipment picked up, it must have been some sort of time warp. Given Bucky’s lack of damage, it must have caught him as he fell before depositing him semi-safely into the next century. Steve hadn’t seen it, but then again, he hadn’t seen Bucky hit the ground when he fell from the train, either. 

Seventy years ago, Bucky fell from the train. Seventy years later, Steve found him again. 

Steve’s breathing returned to him as he gingerly picked Bucky up and began walking back to the clearing where SHIELD’s jet was waiting to take him home — no, to take  _ them _ home. Perhaps it was selfish, to internally celebrate the presence of another man out of time; that didn’t mean Steve was going to mourn it, either. His best friend returned to him due to some no small miracle; perhaps the universe decided it wasn’t going to be so cruel to Steve after all.

A small whisper, barely audible, broke Steve out of his thoughts.

“Steve?...”

A small smile tugged at the corners of the supersoldier’s lips, one more content than it has been for a while, perhaps the most content one this century. 

“Yeah, Buck, it’s me. Get some rest; we’re safe.”

Even if the mud-coated brunette wanted to argue, he was unable to, for the pull of exhaustion was too powerful to him to overcome, and he was unconscious again. Steve didn’t mind; the war was over, and they were coming home, even if it was in a different century than they originally planned to. 

Needless to say, SHIELD had a field day when Steve returned to the jet with a man long thought dead in his arms. It was deduced that whatever weapons HYDRA used in the 40s, the ones powered by the Tesseract, had caused the initial microshreds in time, and Loki’s usage of the device in New York somehow affected those microtears and caused Sergeant Barnes to fall into another century. No other such time warps occurred throughout the world in the following days, and it appeared that Bucky’s case was unique. For once, though, Steve wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth and accepted the situation as it was. The moment Bucky was cleared by SHIELD’s doctors (the day after Steve found him, once he was cleaned up and given clothing that wasn’t caked in mud and damaged beyond repair), Steve took him home to his apartment to introduce him to the future  _ properly _ . (Because putting a confused guy in a room that was obviously faked to make it seem safe actually made it seem even more like a trap, contrary to what SHIELD thought.)

**Author's Note:**

> Hello friends! I hope you enjoyed this little work, for it did give me slight troubles when I was writing it. 
> 
> As usual, my works are beta-read by the one and only amazingly wonderful [SpaceKeet!](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SpaceKeet/pseuds/SpaceKeet) If you get the chance, go out and give her some love!
> 
> As always, thank you all so much for reading! If you liked it, feel free to drop a kudos or bookmark, or alternatively comment if you have something you want to say. Wanna contact me? You can find me on [Tumblr](https://polska-1999.tumblr.com/) or ask me for my Discord in the comments.


End file.
